I can be guilty of waiting around for Robert to be the impetus behind my life adventures.  I can be so burdened with creative focus (which really can be a blinding burden at times, and by that I mean, all consuming so that everything and everyone else in life gets dropped completely and existence is the suffering and glory of getting out of bed, creating until I’m exhausted, and falling back into bed…for days and days on end) that I simply cannot pull my mind and body away from the work.  So Robert pulls my mind and body away, and we go launch our raft on a river, walk out with backpacks into a mountain range, hunt antelope in the high desert or chase chukar for days.  He’s a planner and it makes us both doers.

When he isn’t home for these long stretches, the planning and the doing fall to me.  It’s when my body breaks down after too many consecutive days of work that I snap out of creative obsession and realize I need to step away, for the sake of my mind, but also for the sake of my neck, right shoulder and back.  So I do.  If I can.  I  load the truck, load the dogs, pack the Yeti, and head for the highway.  Half the time I don’t have a clue where I am going; the vapors of wanderlust have shrouded my head like lenticular puffs sliding over a mountain peak in curving wisps.  I pull the truck around, take the one way streets out of the valley bottom, turn on my ticker, enter the stream of traffic on the highway and like a salmon headed upriver I drive, drive, drive until the land and sky open up and I feel myself come home.

It doesn’t have to be the mountains.  Sometimes there’s too much emphasis put on the mountains as being THE PLACE to connect with the thing we’re all trying to get a firmer grip on.  For me it’s all about space and a general absence of humanity.  I just want to go somewhere that no one else is, grab my scrap of earth, twine my fingers down into it, watch the clouds canter in and out of space, glass for elk, deer and antelope, watch the hawks hunt, listen to the river run, hear the sound of the human world fade away.  I want to slide into a hot spring and simply let my mind drift into the world of daydreams while the wind ruffles the junipers.

I want to be alone, or alone with people who know my heart of hearts and are alright with me being silent.  I want to be with my dogs and run free like they do.  I want to fall into rhythm with the sun and moon; live my living while it’s light out, sleep when the stars rule the night, wake up with a cold nose and start a stove with numb fingers.  I want all the sharpness to return to my senses, I want steel blades for eyes, ears that hear the grass clanging in the breeze and the sometimes terrifying sense of being watched by wild and hungry eyes (I’ve always said the times I have felt most alive is when I have been hunted by something unseen).

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I bought a day planner this year.  I’ve never had one before which is part of the reason I’ve been such a doggone flake part of my life (I think the other reason is simply that I like to feel free and sometimes forgetting seems like it takes me there).  I used to write myself little notes on scraps of paper that would flitter around the house and studio like giant pieces of confetti.  It was chaos.  Now, I’ve never been so organized!  I told a friend recently that when I look down at the pages of my day planner, swimming with fresh ink and penciled in messages (like a black bears claw marks on an aspen) I sometimes feel like every booking I make, like a civilized little human being, is bleeding my wildness out of me.

But then again, every day I shift towards a state of complete un-domestication, I mean I move entropically towards the state of being feral — tangled hair, wild eyebrows, flickering eyes, and the quaking desire to lope across foothills and drink from rivers.  I grow gradually unkept until I wake up one morning and the scale has tipped fully to one side and I need to break out, I have to satiate my need for space and freedom.  I love the things that keep me on the edge of tame, but I also like to buck it all off and gallop like cuss to a wide open place where nothing can own me.

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Idaho has been top notch lately; sunny and warm between snow squalls and rain.  The hot springs have been boiling and tranquil, the antelope herds have been massive, the hawks have been claiming fenceposts and telephone poles when they’re not swirling around in thin air.  The mountain peaks have been nothing short of mystical — chanting life into the clouds up where they build and break open.  The foothills are already chirping with song birds, the magpies are building nests, I hear the song of the yellow-winged blackbird rising up from the river behind the house here and elsewhere, the steelhead are coming in — shining like bright polished sterling.  It’s always a good day to be Idahoan, but it’s especially good lately.  I’m not sure any other rivers and roads will bring me home, time and time again, quite like these do.